an unbroken list of years back to 911/912 BC, but prior to
that uncertainties begin, and the further back we go the
more these uncertainties increase. Even among the
secularists there are the long, middle, and short
chronologies, albeit the ‘long’ is now largely abandoned. 6
We must then look for correlations and synchronisms of
kings and events, but this is not easy: from our perspective
we might talk , for example, of Shalmaneser I and Hattu-shili III, but ancient texts do not have Roman numerals
after a king’s name. Again, Muwatilli II fought Ramesses
II at the Battle of Kadesh in the fifth year of the latter’s
reign, but this synchronism leaves open the question of
the chronological placement of Ramesses II.

On the Egyptian side it is all too easy to point to a
similarity of a name in the Bible and on an Egyptian
monument, then jump to the conclusion that these two
names refer to the same king. An obvious example is
the Shishaq of 1 Kings 14: 25, and the Shoshenq of the
Bubastite Portal. Yet as we compare the itinerary of this
king’s conquests in Palestine as per the Bubastite Portal
with the account in 1 Kings 14: 25–26 they are quite
different: Shoshenq never went near Jerusalem. Are then
the two references to the same person after all?

A related problem in this connection concerns by what
name an Egyptian pharaoh was known in foreign nations,
and for that matter by the general populace. As is well
known, the royal titulary had five names: the Horus, the
nebty, the golden Horus, the nesu-bit or prenomen, and
the son-of-Re or birth name. We can gain some insight
here from the letter of Ankh-hesen-amun, the widow of
the teenage king Tutankhamun, to Šuppiluliuma of the
Hittites. She refers to her dead husband as Niphururiya—a
precise rendering in cuneiform of Tutankhamun’s
prenomen Nebkheperure, but not by his birth name. 7
This seems to have been usual for diplomacy of the time.
As to popular versions of a pharaoh’s name, it is well
known that, for example, Ramesses II was known as Sessi,
apparently a hypocoristicon of his birth name. 8

Then there are the various Egyptian king lists: Abydos,
Karnak, Turin Canon, Palermo Stone (for the early
period), to name some, but we need to bear in mind the
purpose of these lists. They were not composed, of course,
to inform historians of the 20th and 21st centuries! They
were rather political statements; propaganda to proclaim
continuity with their ancestors and thus legitimacy for
their own tenure of the throne. That said, however, their
evidence is as it is and must be given its due weight.

So again, evidence must be sifted and evaluated, butmy own view is that while the existing scheme ofEgyptian history needs some ‘squeezing’—at timesradical squeezing—at the same time the generally agreedscheme of the secularists cannot be dismissed out ofhand, or drastically overturned in the way that radicalrevisionists seek to do (such as those following Velikovskyand Courville). The Bible must be our bedrock positionindeed, but at the same time we need to listen carefullyto the secularists, without necessarily accepting theirschemes wholesale.

Before proceeding further, in order to acquaint the nonspecialists with ancient history, and enable them to understand
better the drift of argument presented here, I will outline the
conventional historical schemes of first, ancient Egypt, and
then second, of ancient Mesopotamia and Anatolia.

Pharaonic Egypt accordingto conventional chronology9

Dynasties Leading King Dates (bc)

Early Dynastic 3150–2686
Early Egypt formed with two major kingdoms, Lower and Upper Egypt,
which were often at war with each other. However, two kings are known
for this pre-Dynastic period, ‘Scorpion’ and Nar’mer, the latter apparently being the king who united by force the two kingdoms. Nar’mer’s
successor, Hor-Aha, who also bore the nebty-name Men, seems to be
the Menes of Manetho’s record, the founder of a united Egypt.